I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie

by Roger Ebert

The purpose of a movie critic is to encourage good films and discourage bad ones. Of course, there is much disagreement about which is which. The films in this book, however, have few defenders. The degree of their badness ranges from those that are deplorable to others that are merely hilariously misguided. Some of them are even fun, although not so much fun you would want to see them twice.

You remember Peter Cushing. He’s the one in all those British horror films, standing between Vincent Price and Christopher Lee. His dialogue usually runs along the lines of, “But good heavens, man! The person you saw has been dead for more than two centuries!”

Well, anyway, Doug and the professor step out into this sinister underworld, which is filled with telepathic giant parrots, and the next thing you know they’re on the chain gang. The chain gang spends all day breaking up rocks. You wouldn’t think there would be a rock shortage at Earth’s core, but there you are.

And it proves something I’ve long suspected: Babies are cute only when they’re being babies. When they’re presented as miniature adults (on greeting cards, in TV commercials, or especially in this movie) there is something so fundamentally wrong that our human instincts cry out in protest.

Here’s another one of those movies where a Caribbean voodoo cult wants to practice a blood sacrifice using the child of a Manhattan psychiatrist.

I wonder how Ben learned English. I seem to recall from Willard, last summer’s big rat movie, that Willard trained Ben to heel, beg, roll over, play dead, and sic Ernest Borgnine. Not bad for a rat. But when did Ben learn English? It takes Berlitz six weeks of intensive training to get a French businessman to the point where he can proposition an American girl, and here’s Ben learning instinctively.

Aieee! This movie is fech! We can hardly wait for the end so we can gwee. We kill time in between by eating popcorn and other ool. The movie is ca-ca. There are a few good moments, mostly involving the giant prehistoric dinosaurs and other machas, especially during zug-zug. But the movie is mostly fech, nya, and pooka, if you ask ma.

But it has a basic problem, which is that there is no popular original material for it to satirize. There has never been a really successful movie set in prehistoric times, although God knows they’ve tried, with movies like When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and One Million Years B.C. Those movies were self-satirizing; by the end, they were making fun of the way they started out.

Any movie that has to link clichés that closely is unable to think of anything to go in between them.

Anyway, in The Deathmaster, Quarry arrives at dawn in an old coffin that floats up on the beach at Santa Monica. If memory serves, it is the same beach used for the opening scene of Attack of the Crab Monsters. Crab monsters would be a relief, in fact, but what with the price of crabmeat these days they have all gone into different lines of work or simply dropped out of circulation. The next time you eat a crabmeat cocktail, reflect that it could be eating you.

Comedians have long been a lightning rod for society, drawing down the dangers and grounding them. Some of the most brilliant comics of recent years—Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin—have dealt with taboo words and concepts. But they bring insight and an attitude to them. They help us see how we regard them. They provide a form of therapy, of comic relief. Not Clay. Strutting and sneering, lacking the graceful timing of the great stand-up talents, reciting his words woodenly, he creates a portrait of the comedian as sociopath.

Crowds can be frightening. They have a way of impressing low, base taste upon their members.

The story is recycled out of a 1983 French film named Les Comperes, as part of a trend in which Hollywood buys French comedies and experiments on them to see if they can be made in English with all of the humor taken out.

Continuity is a game you play only during a movie that gives you little else to think about.

This movie hasn’t paid enough dues to get away with such a smarmy payoff.

Sinking into my seat in this movie theater from my childhood, I remembered the movie fantasies when I was a kid. They involved teenagers who fell in love, made out with each other, customized their cars, listened to rock and roll, and were rebels without causes. Neither the kids in those movies nor the kids watching them would have understood a worldview in which the primary function of teenagers is to be hacked to death.

Dad says, “My generation thought that working was the best way to support a family.” Dad doesn’t even know what generation he belongs to. Dad is in his fifties, so is a member of the sixties generation. He is thinking of his parents’ generation.

“Today they write dialogue about cheeseburgers and big special effects,” one of the characters says, contrasting the quoted classics with Pulp Fiction. Yes, but Tarantino’s cheeseburger dialogue is wonderful comic writing, with an evil undercurrent as the hit men talk while approaching a dangerous meeting; no dialogue in this movie tries anything a fraction as ambitious, or risks anything.

In the old days this movie would have starred Stewart Granger and Trevor Howard, and they would have known it was bad but they would have seemed at home in it, cleaning their rifles and chugging their gin like seasoned bwanas. Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas never for a second look like anything other than thoroughly unhappy movie stars stuck in a humid climate and a doomed production. I hope someone made a documentary about the making of this film. Now that would be a movie worth seeing.

• I have often wondered why we hate mimes so much. Many people have such an irrational dislike for them that they will cross the street rather than watch some guy in whiteface pretending to sew his hands together. Examining Michael Myers’s makeup in Halloween H20, I realized he looks so much like Marcel Marceau as to make no difference. Maybe he is a mime when he’s not slashing. Maybe what drove him mad was years and years of trying to make a living in malls while little kids kicked him to see if he was real. This would also explain his ability to seem to walk while somehow staying in the same place.

The Idiot Plot, you will recall, is a plot in which the secrets are so obvious, and are concealed through such a convoluted chain of contrivances, that if one character were to blurt out one piece of information, everything would instantly be solved.

Then I remembered. The movie was reminding me of the works of Robert Bresson, the great, austere French director who had a profound suspicion of actors. He felt they were always trying to slip their own energy, their own asides, their own “acting” into his movies. So he rehearsed them tirelessly, fifty or sixty times for every shot, until they were past all thought and caring. And then, when they were zombies with the strength to do only what he required, and nothing more, he was satisfied. That’s what I got out of Beatty and Hoffman in Ishtar. There’s no hint of Hoffman’s wit and intelligence in Tootsie, no suggestion of Beatty’s grace and good humor in Heaven Can Wait, no chemistry between two actors who should be enjoying the opportunity to act together. No life.

The Jackal strikes me as the kind of overachiever who, assigned to kill a mosquito, would purchase contraband insecticides from Iraq and bring them into the United States by hot-air balloon, distilling his drinking water from clouds and shooting birds for food.

The plot of Jungle 2 Jungle has been removed from a French film called Little Indian, Big City. The operation is a failure and the patient dies. The only reason I am rating this movie at one star while Little Indian, Big City got “no stars” is that Jungle 2 Jungle is too mediocre to deserve no stars. It doesn’t achieve truly awful badness, but is sort of a black hole for the attention span, sending us spiraling down into nothingness. Most of the comic moments come from the “fish out of water” premise, or “FOW,” as Hollywood abbreviates it (you know a plot’s not original when it has its own acronym). The kid has been raised in the jungle, and now, in the city, he tries to adapt. There are many jokes involving his pet tarantula, which he has brought along with him, and his darts, which Allen uses to accidentally put his fiancée’s cat to sleep.

Genies are only fun in the movies if you define and limit their powers. That should have been obvious, but the filmmakers didn’t care to extend themselves beyond the obvious commercial possibilities of their first dim idea.

Seems to be a broad problem involving any all-powerful characters - you run into this same problem with Superman movies and certain kinds of slasher movies where the killer can't be stopped.

Every one of Russell’s films have been an exercise in wretched excess. Sometimes it works. Russell loves the bizarre, the Gothic, the overwrought, the perverse. The strangest thing about The Lair of the White Worm is that, by his standards, it is rather straight and square.

New meaning is given to the disclaimer “no animals were harmed during the filming of this movie” by a scene where a cow is dangled from a helicopter as bait for the crocodile. I believe the cow wasn’t harmed, but I’ll bet she was really upset.

Are there stars in the sky? Does a bear shine his shoes in the woods?

I should get these phrases burned into a plaque for my kitchen.

Golding’s novel is the sort of fable that could shock only those who believe in the onwardness and upwardness of civilization, as some still did in those days. At the time of its publication (1954) attempts were made to find political messages in it, but today it seems more like a sad, literal prophecy of what is happening in neighborhoods ruled by drugs. What week goes by without another story of a Ralph gunned down by a Jack?

Supplying a character with too much equipment is a creaky comedy wheeze; in a good movie, they’d give him one pooper scooper and think of something funny to do with it.

movie has ambitions to look like one of Sergio Leone’s Italian Westerns—it has the eerie music and the vast landscapes and the irritating habit of opening and closing scenes with zooms as dramatic as they’re arbitrary. Watching it, we reflect that Leone was never too strong on plotting either (what actually happened in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly remains a matter of great controversy). But Leone at least was the master of great moments—stretches of film that worked, even if they meant nothing.

The film is about a man and a woman who believe in great true love. The man believes it’s behind him; the woman hopes it’s ahead of her. One of their ideals in life is “to be somebody’s true north.” Right away we know they’re in trouble. You don’t just find true love. You team up with somebody, and build it from the ground up. But Message in a Bottle believes in the kind of love where the romantic music comes first, trembling and sweeping under every scene, and the dialogue is treated like the lyrics.

Some families need healing. This one needs triage.

characters! The dialogue is written with the theory that whatever people would say in life, they should say in a movie (“This is a wonderful view!” “I’ve never been in the front seat of a cab before!”).

Fascism and its favorite sexual taste, sadomasochism, have come into a certain degree of fashion in the movies recently, and that’s the subject of a scary essay by Susan Sontag in the New York Review of Books. She finds films like The Night Porter to be, on one level at least, attractive to certain audiences because of their undertones of doom and death. That may be an aspect of the times or it may just be that such movies reach areas of the personality that weren’t widely admitted before; she’s not sure. But she’s worried.

The director, Liliana Cavani, describes her film as a love story, praises the honesty between her two leading characters, and sees the story as a straightforward handling of one aspect of the concentration camp experience. I see it as a shallow exploitation of that theme, containing no real insight or understanding. Even worse, the movie is now being marketed as a controversial audience-grabber. One theater marquee quotes the New York Times: “A kinky turn-on!” I looked up that Times review. Its opening sentence was: “Let us now consider a piece of junk.”

I have nothing against sentiment, but it must be earned.

This, I would submit, is the primary problem with 99.5% of all "family films" - they won't earn their keep.

How do you review a movie like this? I am reminded of an interview I once did with a man who ran a carnival sideshow. His star was a geek, who bit off the heads of live chickens and drank their blood. “He’s the best geek in the business,” this man assured me. “What is the difference between a good geek and a bad geek?” I asked. “You wanna examine the chickens?”

The movie is an invaluable experiment in the theory of cinema, because it demonstrates that a shot-by-shot remake is pointless; genius apparently resides between or beneath the shots, or in chemistry that cannot be timed or counted.

There are, I am sometimes convinced, two Ken Russells: The disciplined and gifted director of such films as Women in Love, Altered States, and Tommy, and the orchestrator of wretched excess in films like The Music Lovers, Gothic, and this one. Despite the fact that Salome’s Last Dance encompasses almost the entire text of a play by Oscar Wilde, it seems shapeless and without purpose. Russell has devised a production without inventing a goal. At the end of the film, there are some shocks and surprises, some foreshadowing of Wilde’s long fall into despair, but they seemed tacked on as a favor to the history buffs. There’s never the feeling that this whole film was thought out from beginning to end with any particular structure in mind.

Watching the film, I remembered a conversation I had with the actor John Malkovich about the way that off-Broadway theater was dying in New York while thriving in the provinces. “To have off-Broadway,” he said,”you have to have starving actors. And to have starving actors, you have to have a place for them to starve. New York is too expensive for that. You can’t afford to starve there anymore.”

Starship Troopers is the most violent kiddie movie ever made. I call it a kiddie movie not to be insulting, but to be accurate: Its action, characters, and values are pitched at eleven-year-old science fiction fans. That makes it true to its source. It’s based on a novel for juveniles by Robert A. Heinlein. I read it when I was in grade school. I have improved since then, but the story has not.

I wouldn’t really mind the clichés and the tired old material so much, if the filmmakers had brought energy or a sense of style to the material. A good singer can make an old song new.

Allegories have trouble standing for something else if they are too convincing as themselves. That is the difficulty with The Tin Drum, which is either (a) an allegory about one person’s protest against the inhumanity of the world, or (b) the story of an obnoxious little boy.

You remember the story about John Carter of Mars. He was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s hero, and he galloped all over Mars on whatever passed for a horse up there. One day he was attacked and chased by a band of villains who started hacking at him with their swords. Carter of Mars drew his own trusty blade and started hacking back at them, while trying to make it up the castle stairs. But they were too much for him. First he lost a leg. Then an arm. They were gaining on him. “The hell with this,” said John Carter, throwing away his sword, drawing his atomic ray gun and zapping the bad guys into a radioactive ash heap. I think about that story every time I see a Kung Fu movie, because Kung Fu movies depend on the same unwritten rules as John Carter novels: Nobody can have a gun. If they had a gun, they’d just shoot you, and you wouldn’t get to go through the whole “aaaaaiiiiieeeee” number and leap about with your fists flashing, your foot cocked, and your elbow of death savagely bent. It’s great to have a black belt, but it’s better if the bad guys know the rules.

Watching U-Turn, I was reminded of a concert pianist playing “Chopsticks”: It is done well, but one is disappointed to find it done at all.

The big differences between Astaire and Rogers in Swing Time and Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore in The Wedding Singer is that (1) in 1936 they were more sophisticated than we are now, and knew the plot was inane, and had fun with that fact, and (2) they could dance. One of the sad by-products of the dumbing-down of America is that we’re now forced to witness the goofy plots of the 1930s played sincerely, as if they were really deep.

I have nothing but admiration for people who want to spare the lives of our fellow inhabitants on spaceship Earth, but I wish they would appear in full-witted movies. Turtle Diary, for example, was a wonderful and complex movie about two people who conspired to steal some giant turtles from the zoo and return them to the ocean. When the Whales Came is a simpleminded movie by filmmakers who have conspired to make a predictable and morose parable and bang us over the head with it until it is dead.